When Your Thoughts Need An Escape

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Sometimes we come to the point when our head is overfilled with thoughts and we need to find a way out for them. It’s great if at that moment you have someone you trust near you and you can express your thoughts in person. If not, you might still be needing to clear your mind. And this is when recording your thoughts may come in handy.

There’s no big difference whether you want to express your positive or negative thoughts (yet often we tend to concentrate more on the latter). But let’s start with the positive ones. Recording our happy memories and feelings is like writing an open letter to our future selves. In times when we feel down, being able to look back at all the great moments in our past (even the little ones) may bright up our day. People tend to concentrate more on negative thoughts while happy moments may pass by almost unnoticed.

Of course, life consists of ups and downs, but memorizing your ups may help you to feel more grateful and happier in life. 

Writing down negative thoughts works in a little different way, though. Usually, no one is eager to share the “downs” and it’s totally understandable. However, when you need to express your feelings (the bad ones, first of all), writing them down can work as a form of therapy. There won’t be a second person to listen to you and say something in response; but there will be you and only you, getting a chance to listen to yourself and speak to yourself through writing.

Reflecting while writing may even help you realize what causes your negative thoughts. It may help you to understand that, probably, your situation is not that bad. Going through your bad feelings and what causes them will make it easier to accept the whole situation and/or to change your attitude. The realization may come during the process – it’s highly possible that you won’t even finish your writing when you suddenly begin to take in the situation from a different perspective.

It works for decision-making as well. Everyone knows how difficult it can be to make an important decision. It’s great when we have someone we can talk to about our choice, maybe hearing an advice or at least someone else’s point of view. If there’s no one you can talk to or you just feel like your decision shouldn’t be affected by someone else’s opinion, recording your thoughts is an option. Many of us do that in the form of pros and cons list but it’s better to save this option for the decisions such as whether to eat another pastry or not.

When making really important decisions, such as those influencing our life, we’ll definitely need more than a simple list. Some decisions need a lot of thinking and it’s better to write down your thoughts when in the process of deciding. Again, it will help you to reflect and maybe you’ll suddenly come up with the decision while writing. Even if not, after you’re done you can go through a more in-depth analysis of your feelings. Organizing your thoughts, rather than thinking about it chaotically, will contribute to making a more considered decision.

After all, writing is a good release for all our thoughts and feelings. Think of the diaries almost all little girls (and some boys, too) had in their childhood – the need of expressing your thoughts has no age. Sometimes it’s way easier to write something than to say it out loud, so why not starting today?